Widow Maker by Pamela R. Anderson-Bartholet

Widow Maker is a powerful collection of poems that draws the reader through the heart-rending trauma and horror, tinged with hope and mercy, that the author and her husband face as he endures a medical crisis that few survive, including “the fear that my heart might continue beating/after his is done.” There are also moments of grace and unexpected joy as the couples’ love persists through the ordeal. While reading, I experienced chills, shed tears, and in the end, immediately had to go back and read it all again. Highly recommended!
–John Burroughs, Ohio Beat Poet Laureate 2019-2021, author of Rattle and Numb

In Widow Maker, Anderson-Bartholet skillfully confronts life in all of its hard and soft urgencies; frailty, mortality, and the literal heart’s “tribal beating.” This collection is part invocation, part accusation—how we both praise and curse the body that both sustains and fails us. But like her narrator, the poet asks the reader to never glance “down or back,” and we don’t want to. This courageous, at times wrenching, collection shows a poet who understands language as grace.

–Jessica Jewell, author of Dust Runner

Widow Maker is an intimate lyric account of a wife’s crossing the threshold of cardiac trauma where “we breathe metrics” after a husband’s failed heart “snaps…in half” the speaker’s own heart. In apt metaphor, the physiology of cardiac arrest is projected into the world outside her door―a world of “slender arteries” of mud daubers’ nests. We lean into these poems to catch every nuance and sift the subtle layering of experience and emotion captured in clean speech lines. In gripping narrative, the poet depicts a season lurking at the “intersection between earth and sky.” This exceptional collection is an invitation to join the poet through the great personal distance she covers: a speaker “stunned” by the widow maker’s work moves through an enormous room of dread, guarded hope and ultimately comes to celebrate and “claim what’s left of the day.”

–Barbara Sabol, author of Imagine a Town